In the late winter of 2020-21, an ignorant billboard campaign proliferated in Poland. Here's what I thought.
The message is ubiquitous, posted on billboards all over Poland. Written in the imperative, it seems to leave no room for discussion. As such, it’s much like an order. What’s ironic about this is that it comes from a church-based organization. The last time I checked, the church was a Christian organization, whose tenets include the idea of universal compassion and empathy. A general order, a priori, precludes compassion and empathy as it leaves no room for discussion. This is why the law has courts. Laws are much like an order, and so as to make room for compassion, empathy, and to allow for the fact that written rules cannot cover the full gamut of human experience, we have a legal system that allows cases that have broken those laws to be heard.
And so, it seems this church-based organization has lost touch with the tenets of its fundamental beliefs, belying compassion and instead, demanding the parental population at large ‘love one another.’
I think there are two aspects of this worth examining, the first is the lack of awareness of the human condition that such an imperative reveals, and the second, more conjectural aspect, is the psychological origins that this sort of impulse to demand such a thing of the parental population may have come from.
It’s difficult to say what exactly the billboard campaign is suggesting beyond the simple message, but I think there are two basic possibilities. One, given the Christian origins of the message, it’s suggesting parents rely on love rather than separation or divorce. The second possibility may be gleaned from the context of the abortion ban in Poland and the resulting backlash. In both cases, the message displays a lack of understanding of the human condition.
In the first instance, the message seems to purport the belief that all relationship problems can be solved with love. This ignores the complexities of human nature, and whether, as one simple example, relationships are toxic or healthy. Any person in touch with reality will tell you that a) there is such a thing as a toxic relationship and b) they should be ended. Toxicity in parental relations can be traumatic for children and so it’s often a better option for the parents to split and have the opportunity to work on themselves before engaging in another relationship. Not that this always happens, but separation is often a necessary procedure in such circumstances as many psychologists would attest to. As such, this message only underscores the ignorance of our modern human understanding of relationships and instead, relies on old-world beliefs that a couple can remain together if they simply love one another. Not only is it true that many people don’t know how to love in such a way because of their individual traumas, but the assumption that that’s possible is most certainly based on a worldview that comes from a time where social roles and individual expectations were entirely different. In the olden days as it were, marriages were a sort of business partnership — a cooperative means to an end. Hence the yearnings in stories of ‘true love’ and the romanticism of yore. The expectations of those relationships were settled before they even started. Such is no longer the case and hasn’t been since women’s equality was a thing. Of course, on top of that, the economy before the industrial revolution did not commodify everything for consumption creating demands on the individual and on the parents like never before. Finally, in our internetized world, individualism has never been as fetishized. Thus, the ills of our modern world are severe and any social commentary that takes itself half-seriously must account for them. And so, to demand that parents simply love one another is to express a lack of understanding of the world we live in.
The second possible message is that the billboard is an attempt to spread the underlying belief is that abortion is a question that can be avoided if people only have sex under the conditions of really loving each other. Human sexuality experts will tell you that restricting human sexuality in this way is unhealthy, and so yet again, the promoters of this message work only to express their lack of awareness of contemporary conversations on human psychology and mental health. They’re literally basing their worldview on a medieval understanding of the human condition. But then, there are many who support this worldview, and this brings me to my second reflection arising from this billboard campaign: where does this kind of demand come from?
The simple answer to that question may be ‘The Church.’ Sure. But does that then suggest that all churchgoers are inclined to agree with this medieval understanding of the human condition? Perhaps. Even if they are, they’ll still fall into the same category as those who have that worldview and aren’t faithful churchgoers. What then catalyzes this ignorant understanding of the world? Ignorance means a lack of knowledge, of course, but I think it’s more than that. Because any of those individuals who support this billboard campaign probably don’t see themselves as ignorant and would likely take offence to that accusation. As such, I’d like to briefly examine what else might encourage someone to adhere to such beliefs.
To willfully ignore something is, fundamentally, to fear it. If someone fears contemporary academic discussions around human sexuality, mental health, as well as the commodification of human interaction, the fetishization of novelty and individualism and competition that the modern world and the global economic system supporting it catalyzes, then they’ve chosen to live outside informed public discourse and ask not to be taken seriously. They would perhaps benefit by exploring the root causes of their fears and seeking to understand how they might overcome them so that they might intelligently and knowledgeably participate in social conversation with the prerequisite self-awareness and emotional intelligence that any helpful conversation in that realm requires.
Ultimately, whatever the true intentions of the billboard message are, I’d like to encourage all Poles to see it as an embarrassment to what love between individuals actually is, and as complete ignorance to what parenting in the modern world demands.
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